Italy


The use of administrative documents to communicate and leave record of business information requires of methods able to automatically extract and understand the content from such documents in a robust and efficient way. In addition, the semi-structured nature of these reports is specially suited for the use of graph-based representations which are flexible enough to adapt to the deformations from the different document templates. Moreover, Graph Neural Networks provide the proper methodology to learn relations among the data elements in these documents. 
In this work we study the use of Graph Neural Network architectures to tackle the problem of entity recognition and relation extraction in semi-structured documents. Our approach achieves state of the art results in the three tasks involved in the process. Additionally, the experimentation with two datasets of different nature demonstrates the good generalization ability of our approach.

ICPR 2020

Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi Structured Documents

document analysis

relation extraction

named entity recognition

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


technical paper

This paper presents a weakly supervised object detection method based on activity label and relationship modeling, which is motivated by the assumption that configuration of human and object are similar in same activity, and joint modeling of human, active object and activity could leverage the recognition of them. Compared to most weakly supervised method taking object as independent instance, firstly, active human and object proposals are learned and filtered based on class activation map of multi-label classification. Secondly, a spatial relationship prior including relative position, scale, overlaps etc are learned dependent on action. Finally, a multistream object detection framework integrating the spatial prior and pairwise ROI pooling are proposed to jointly learn the object and action class. Experiments are conducted on HICODET dataset, and our approach outperforms the state of the art weakly supervised object detection methods.

Activity and Relationship Modeling Driven Weakly Supervised Object Detection

In this presentation, we introduce an interpretable non-linear model called itemset Sparse Bayes (iSB), which builds a Bayesian probabilistic model, while simultaneously considering variable interactions. In order to suppress the resulting large number of variables, sparsity is imposed on regression weights by a sparsity inducing prior. As a subroutine to search for variable interactions, itemset enumeration algorithm is employed with a novel bounding condition.
In computational experiments using real-world dataset, the proposed method performed better than decision tree by 10% in terms of r2. In addition, ISB gives us a clue to under- stand which variables interactions are important in optimizing an unknown function.

Automatically mining relevant variable interactions via sparse Bayesian learning

This paper addresses the task of classifying galaxy clusters, which are the largest known objects in the Universe. Galaxy clusters can be categorized as cool-core (CC), weak- cool-core (WCC), and non-cool-core (NCC), depending on their central cooling times. Traditional classification approaches used in astrophysics are inaccurate and rely on measuring surface brightness concentrations or central gas densities. In this work, we propose a multi-branch attention network that uses spatial attention to classify a given cluster. To evaluate our network, we use a database of simulated X-ray emissivity images, which contains 954 projections of 318 clusters. Experimental results show that our network outperforms several strong baseline methods and achieves a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.83. We highlight the value of our proposed spatial attention module through an ablation study.

Multi-Branch Attention Networks for Classifying Galaxy Clusters


Recent co-part segmentation methods mostly operate in a supervised learning setting, which requires a large amount of annotated data for training. To overcome this limitation, we propose a self-supervised deep learning method for co-part segmentation. Differently from previous works, our approach develops the idea that motion information inferred from videos can be leveraged to discover meaningful object parts. To this end, our method relies on pairs of frames sampled from the same video. The network learns to predict part segments together with a representation of the motion between two frames, which permits reconstruction of the target image. Through extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available video sequences we demonstrate that our approach can produce improved segmentation maps with respect to previous self-supervised co-part segmentation approaches.

Motion supervised co-part segmentation

The target of human pose estimation is to determine the body parts and joint locations of persons in the image. Angular changes, motion blur and occlusion in the natural scenes make this task challenging, while some joints are more difficult to be detected than others. In this paper, we propose an augmented Parallel-Pyramid Net (P2Net) with feature refinement by dilated bottleneck and attention module. During data preprocessing, we proposed a differentiable auto data augmentation (DA2) method. We formulate the problem of searching data augmentaion policy in a differentiable form, so that the optimal policy setting can be easily updated by back propagation during training. DA2 improves the training efficiency. A parallel-pyramid structure is followed to compensate the information loss introduced by the network. We innovate two fusion structures, i.e. Parallel Fusion and Progressive Fusion, to process pyramid features from backbone network. Both fusion structures leverage the advantages of spatial information affluence at high resolution and semantic comprehension at low resolution effectively. We propose a refinement stage for the pyramid features to further boost the accuracy of our network. By introducing dilated bottleneck and attention module, we increase the receptive field for the features with limited complexity and tune the importance to different feature channels. To further refine the feature maps after completion of feature extraction stage, an Attention Module (AM) is defined to extract weighted features from different scale feature maps generated by the parallel-pyramid structure. Compared with the traditional up-sampling refining, AM can better capture the relationship between channels. Experiments corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Notably, our method achieves the best performance on the challenging MSCOCO and MPII datasets.

P^2 Net: Augmented Parallel-Pyramid Net for Attention Guided Pose Estimation

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has gained significant attention amongst neural architecture search approaches due to its effectiveness in finding competitive network architectures with affordable computational complexity. However, DARTS' search space is designed such that even a randomly sampled architecture performs reasonably well. Moreover, due to the complexity of search architectural building block or cell, it is unclear whether these are certain operations or the cell topology that contributes most to achieving higher final accuracy. In this work, we dissect the DARTS's search space to understand which components are most effective in producing better architectures. Our experiments show that: (1) Good architectures can be discovered regardless of the search network depth; (2) Separable convolution with 3x3 kernel is the most effective operation in this search space; and (3) The cell topology also has substantial effect on the accuracy. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient search approach referred to as eDARTS, which searches on a pre-specified cell having good topology with increased attention to important operations, using a shallow search supernet. Moreover, we propose some optimizations for eDARTS that significantly speed up the search as well as alleviate the well known skip connection aggregation problem of DARTS. eDARTS achieves an error rate of 2.53% on CIFAR-10 using a 3.1M parameters model whereas the search cost is less than 30 minutes.

Operation and Topology Aware Differentiable Architecture Search


In the present study, we have considered a large number (27) of Indian languages for recognition from their speech signals of different sources. A dense convolutional network architecture (DenseNet) has been used for this classification task. Dynamic elimination of low energy frames from the input speech signal has been considered as a preprocessing operation. Mel-spectrogram of pre-processed speech signal is fed as input to the DenseNet architecture. Language recognition performance of this architecture has been compared with that of several state-of-the-art deep architectures which include a convolutional neural network (CNN), ResNet, CNN-BLSTM and DenseNet-BLSTM hybrid architectures. Additionally, we obtained recognition performances of a stacked BLSTM architecture fed with different sets of handcrafted features for comparison purpose. Simulations for both speaker independent and speaker dependent scenarios have been performed on two different standard datasets which include (i) IITKGP-MLILSC dataset of news clips in 27 different Indian languages and (ii) Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) dataset of telephonic conversations in 5 different Indian languages. In each case, recognition performance of the DenseNet architecture along with Mel-spectrogram features has been found to be significantly better than all other frameworks implemented in this study.

DenseRecognition of Spoken Languages of Electrocardiograms

Current sensor-based human activity recognition techniques that rely on a user-independent model struggle to generalize to new users and on to changes that a person may make over time to his or her way of carrying out activities. Incremental learning is a technique that allows to obtain personalized models which may improve the performance on the classifiers thanks to a continuous learning based on user data. Finally, deep learning techniques have been proven to be more effective with respect to traditional ones in the generation of user-independent models.
The aim of our work is therefore to put together deep learning techniques with incremental learning in order to obtain personalized models that perform better with respect to user-independent model and personalized model obtained using traditional machine learning techniques.
The experimentation was done by comparing the results obtained by a technique in the state of the art with those obtained by two neural networks (ResNet and a simplified CNN) on three datasets. The experimentation showed that neural networks adapt faster to a new user than the baseline.

Personalized Models in Human Activity Recognition using Deep Learning


This paper considers arbitrary document detection performed on a mobile device. The classical contour-based approach often fails in cases featuring occlusion, complex background, or blur. The region-based approach, which relies on the contrast between object and background, does not have application limitations, however, its known implementations are highly resource-consuming. We propose a modification of the contour-based method, in which the competing contour location hypotheses are ranked according to the contrast between the areas inside and outside the border. In the experiments, such modification allows for the decrease of alternatives ordering errors by 40% and the decrease of the overall detection errors by 10%. The proposed method provides unmatched state-of-the-art performance on the open MIDV-500 dataset, and it demonstrates results comparable with state-of-the-art performance on the SmartDoc dataset.

Approach for Document Detection by Contours and Contrasts

We propose a novel joint framework for 3D face reconstruction (3DFR) that integrates facial attribute estimation (FAE) as an auxiliary task. One of the essential problems of 3DFR is to extract semantic facial features (e.g., Big Nose, High Cheekbones, and Asian) from in-the-wild 2D images, which is inherently involved with FAE. These two tasks, though heterogeneous, are highly relevant to each other. To achieve this, we leverage a Convolutional Neural Network to extract shared facial
representations for both shape decoder and attribute classifier. We further develop an in-batch hybrid-task training scheme that enables our model to learn from heterogeneous facial datasets jointly within a mini-batch. Thanks to the joint loss that provides supervision from both 3DFR and FAE domains, our model learns the correlations between 3D shapes and facial attributes, which benefit both feature extraction and shape inference. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative visualization results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our joint framework.

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Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi Structured Documents

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Activity and Relationship Modeling Driven Weakly Supervised Object Detection

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Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Semi Structured Documents